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Leominster's fire-alarm boxes to disappear

By Jack Minch, jminch@sentinelandenterprise.com

Updated:
10/07/2012 08:35:44 AM EDT

LEOMINSTER -- There are still about 71 fire-alarm boxes on red poles with white horizontal stripes scattered around the city streets, but they are tired looking and seem out of place in a digital world.

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It won't be long before they are all gone because businesses are converting to wireless alarms, and as they change, the street boxes are being removed, said Fire Chief Robert A. Sideleau.

The first street box was installed at Mechanic and Water streets Aug. 6, 1891, and it only took until Sept. 12 of that year for the first fire to be reported at Pat Dolan's harness shop on Mount Pleasant Avenue, said retired firefighter Paul Kennedy who is a historian for the Fire Department.

The last fire reported on one of the street boxes was Feb. 18 at Grand and Green streets, when the homeowner's cellphone wasn't working and he had to run outside to the nearest box to report the two-alarm blaze, Kennedy said.

"He had to get the hell out of the house because it was going pretty good, and he pulled the hook," Kennedy said. "That was the last fire we had, and it worked out good."

In the days before house phones and cellphones, the street box was the most expedient way to call for help.

Some street boxes even had telephones for police officers walking a beat to check in with their station.

Then-Fire Chief Frederick W. Johnson was the first to number the boxes so that the first number represented the ward in which it was located, Kennedy said.

When an alarm comes in, the dispatcher cross references the number of bells sounded with a book to find the address of the box.

There is a backup ticker tape system in the fire station that taps out holes representing the bells so the dispatcher can visually check the numbers.

When then-Fire Chief Alfred Leblanc decided to go to a wireless radio system for fire alarms on commercial and government buildings in 2004 it sounded the death knell for street boxes, which have wiring, Sideleau said.

The street boxes are numbered and have mechanical wheels on the innards so when an alarm is pulled it sends its unique alarm to the fire station corresponding to the box number, said Alarm Superintendent Joseph Poirier.

Hard-wire master boxes are prone to wires breaking from age or power outages from broken wires during wind or snowstorms, he said.

The conversion to wireless alarms was supposed to be done by 2010, but because of the economy businesses have been given more time, Sideleau said.

The wireless fire alarms in commercial, industrial and government buildings have battery backup systems and give more information than the wired fire boxes, he said.

Under the older system firefighters would get a street box signal and go to a commercial building then look at a master panel to find out what type of trouble there was.

The new system sends the information to the station so firefighters already know what they will be facing when they arrive on scene.

The wireless signals have up to eight paths, so if one frequency is out of service it finds another, Poirier said.

Additionally, the wireless alarms in buildings signal the fire station every 24 hours to show they are working.

Nowadays the boxes are mostly pulled as pranks.

The pranks were a nightly event in the 1970s and 1980s but had nearly stopped until recently, Sideleau said.

Kennedy, who retired in May 2006, remembered as many as a dozen false alarms in a night during the height of the pranks.

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